Wow! According to this
World tribune news bulletin, which cites a Middle East Newsline report,
a new Israeli product can "determine with 98 percent accuracy whether a
suspicious traveler has intentions to launch an attack during flight."
And it's based on a voice analyzer in a chip small enough to fit in the
frame of a pair of
glasses, a chip which switches a light on for the user, in realtime of
course, to signal (dis-)honesty. The technology was developed by a
mathematician by the name of Liberman
(hmm, that name sounds familiar, was he the one who co-discovered contradiction contours?), and
is manufactured by a company he founded called Nemesysco.
Where to start with a story like this? How about the 98% claim? I will
now demonstrate for you a voice analysis system I designed earlier
today which, while still at the beta test stage, appears to surpass the
accuracy of the Israeli model by close to two percentage points.
I won't discuss the
technology involved in your correspondent's system, save to reveal that
the core technology is a famously impenetrable dictum of the logician
Iksrat der Flard, who pioneered BS conditional semantics:
"Snow is white" is
a lie iff the speaker knows damn well it ain't so.
Having thus established the base case, the remainder of the recursion
falls out naturally, and we merely need to add the basic intonation
recognition capability for detecting BS at the level of individual
propositions. Fortunately, your browser has these capabilities built
in, and it was a simple matter to engineer the system, which I
now present.
For each of the following three sentences, read the sentence aloud in a
normal speaking voice, and then click on the sentence to see the
system's honesty analysis:
Isn't technology amazing? Just to check that the system really performs
at close to 100%, I'm keeping a running tally of system successes and
failures. Hit one of the following two buttons (preferably while
reading aloud what it says) to indicate the accuracy of the system's
analysis. Needless to say, I don't in any way depend on your honesty in
providing this feedback...
So much for 98%. Let's move on to the technology.
For all I know, conventional polygraph technology probably indicates
little more than that people who are tense often sweat. So the bar may
be low in the lie detection industry. Nemesysco's systems may or may
not beat standard polygraphs (although they are certainly less
intrusive), and may or may not be useful. Independently of what the
technology actually is, the company's approach to presenting its
technology suggests their main goal is to pull the wool over the eyes
of the public, terrorists and governmental or other customers alike. In
the US, Nemesysco systems have previously been marketed with the slogan
“The DNA of thought.” Ehh,
pardon? Many recent media references to the company's products mention
that the analysis performed by the systems requires "8000 algorithms." Gosh, what a lot
of algorithms... but heck, from a mathematical perspective I use at
least 8000 algorithms every time I flush the toilet. The company's website leaves us none the wiser
as to what the technology is really about. It spouts all sorts of
nonsense like the following:
The LVA uses a patented
and unique technology to detect "Brain activity finger prints" using
the voice as a "medium" to the brain and analyzes the complete
emotional structure of your subject. Using wide range spectrum analysis
and micro-changes in the speech waveform itself (not micro tremors!) we
can learn about any anomaly in the brain activity, and furthermore,
classify it accordingly. Stress ("fight or flight" paradigm) is only a
small part of this emotional structure…
So what's the big deal here? What for that matter, is the business
model? Well, it may be simple. Nemesysco's biggest customers appear to
be insurance companies. They buy Nemesysco's business solutions for assessing
insurance claims. The insurance companies have nothing to lose, in the
sense that they start off with no sensible way of telling whether
claims are fraudulent, or which parts of claims are fraudulent. But
they do know that if the claimants think that the insurance companies
have a way of telling truth from fiction, then fewer fraudulent claims
will made or sustained. Indeed, Nemesysco's website says that they
offer training courses for insurance claim processors in how to
politely indicate to a claimant that the falsity of a claim has been
discovered, in the hopes that the claim will then be dropped. The
insurance company has little interest, then, in whether Nemesysco's
software really works. For what Nemesysco is really selling is is a
great patter.
What we have here, I believe, is a technologically updated new release
of that psychologically sophisticated version of the Pinocchio effect
that evil parents have been using on their innocent children for
generations, an effect whereby one lie spawns another, and all in the
cause of establishing a norm of honesty:
Mom: Have you washed your hands.
Kid: Yes, Mom.
Mom: I can see your nose growing...
Posted by David Beaver at August 29, 2004 04:52 AM